Sir Richard C. Jebb, The Attic Orators from Antiphon to Isaeos

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Why oratory develops in the law-courts

It is worth while to consider the principal causes

Reasons for this:

of this phenomenon. They may, perhaps, be reduced to three.

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I. Relation of Oratory to Rhetoric.

I. It was of the essence of Greek oratory, as will be seen most clearly when we come to the days of its decline, that its practice should be connected with a theory. Art is the application of rules, generalised from experience, for the production of results; and the Greek conception of speaking as an art implied a Rhetoric. This Rhetoric grew only gradually into a complete system; but from the first there was the fixed tendency to regard oratorical composition as susceptible of a regular analysis. Now, those rules of technical Rhetoric which were the earliest to be formulated could be applied with more precision and more effect in a speech for the law-courts than in a speech for the ekklesia. The true reason of this is not that given derisively by Aristotle¹, that, in forensic speaking, chicanery (τὸ κακοῦργον) has the larger scope; the reason is that, in forensic speaking, the subject is fully and accurately known beforehand to the speaker; the utmost clearness of division is imperative, and is obtainable by a uniform method; and the problem is, how best to use all the resources of persuasion in a limited space of time. The two things to which the technical Rhetoric first addressed itself were, partition, and the treatment of probabilities. The law-courts, then, were the natural field of Rhetoric; and, owing to the closeness of the alliance between the theory and the practice, they were also for a long period the chosen field of Oratory.

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II. Union of military and political functions.

II. In the true Greek conception the citizen was at once general and statesman. So long as this identity lasted, the men at the head of the State neither had leisure for the laborious training necessary to eminence in artistic oratory, nor felt its attainment to be of paramount importance. It was the separation of military from political functions that enabled some men to become finished speakers while others became accomplished soldiers. Perikles spoke the epitaph of those whom he had led to battle; but he had neither opportunity nor inducement to cultivate the art of war with the exactness of an Iphikrates, or the art of oratory with the exactness of a Demosthenes². Yet the division of labour, when it came, was a proof that the civic life of Athens was decaying. Kleon's disaster at Amphipolis was enough, indeed, to indicate that such a division would thenceforth be the rule. The versatility of Alkibiades combined the two parts with a success which had no later parallel. But the definite and recognised separation of military from political leadership cannot be put much above the days of Timotheos and Kallistratos³.

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III. Outer history of Athens.

III. The outer history of Athens, from the disaster in Sicily to the battle of Chaeroneia, presents but two moments favourable to a great political eloquence. One is the struggle with Philip of Macedon. The other is the restoration of Athens, in 378, to the headship of a Naval League, followed by the contest at Athens between the Boeotian and antiBoeotian parties. Around this contest cluster the greatest names in deliberative oratory that appear before the reign of Philip. Kallistratos of Aphidnae, the leader of the anti-Boeotian party, was probably the most eloquent statesman between Perikles and Demosthenes⁴. His opponents, Aristophon of Azenia, Leodamas of Acharnae, Thrasybulos and Kephalos of Kollytos,—especially the two first—were powerful speakers. The meagre notices of their oratory warrant only two general inferences. First, that bold and vigorous illustration of argument was their characteristic merit. Secondly, that they had little or no pretension to artistic completeness of form⁵.